[fa.editor-p] what you see is what you get

C70:editor-people (07/31/82)

>From decvax!utzoo!henry@Berkeley Sat Jul 31 04:05:21 1982
"What you see is what you get" sounds like a fine idea, until one starts
to ask questions like:

	"...what you get" on *what device*???

Combining WYSIWYG with formatting specifications that are sufficiently
high-level and device-independent that the text will look ok when moved
to a different device with different characteristics is very, very hard.
WYSIWYG formatters tend to present a very low-level view of text, with
change primitives being along the lines of "add a blank line here";  it
is quite difficult to abstract from this to a higher-level specification
of what the text is supposed to look like.  In fact, I'm not sure it is
practical to combine WYSIWYG with high-level specifications, at least
not with any civilized user interface.  WYSIWYG inherently tends to focus
people's attention on fiddling with the final output rather than changing
the basic specifications of the text.

					Henry Spencer
					decvax!utzoo!henry